The Story
In the year 1284, the town of Hamelin in lower Germany was suffering from a plague of rats. They were everywhere: in the grain stores and the kitchens, in the beds and the belfries, in the cloaks of the merchants and the cradles of the babies. The cats were overwhelmed. The traps were useless. The people of Hamelin had tried everything, and nothing worked.
The Mayor and his councillors sat in the town hall arguing over what to do when the door opened and a stranger walked in.
He was a striking figure: tall and thin, dressed in a coat of many colors — half yellow, half red — and he carried a long pipe at his lips even as he bowed. His eyes were quick and bright.
"I have heard of your trouble," he said. "I am a piper of some skill, and I can rid your town of its rats. Every last one. Name your price."
The Mayor and councillors looked at each other. The piper's claim seemed impossible. But they were desperate, and so the Mayor said, grandly and without much thinking: "One thousand gold pieces, if you do as you say."
The piper nodded, put his pipe to his lips, and stepped out into the street.
The first notes he played were strange and sweet — not quite like any music the townspeople had heard before. And then the rats came. They poured out of the houses and the cellars and the granaries, streaming into the street in rivers of brown and grey, hundreds upon hundreds of them, all following the piper as he walked slowly toward the river Weser. He stepped to the bank, and the rats followed him in, and the river took them, and they were gone.
Every single one.
The town erupted in celebration. People danced in the streets and hung flowers from the windows. The piper returned to the town hall and stood before the Mayor, his hand extended.
The Mayor looked at him differently now that the rats were gone. One thousand gold pieces seemed suddenly excessive for an afternoon's work with a pipe. He offered the piper fifty — a generous sum, he said, all things considered.
The piper's bright eyes went very still. "We had a bargain," he said quietly.
"A bargain made in desperation is hardly binding," said the Mayor, with the smooth confidence of a man who had broken many bargains before.
The piper said nothing. He turned and walked back out into the street.
He put his pipe to his lips and played again — different notes this time, higher and sweeter and more compelling than before. And the children came. Out of the houses they streamed, laughing and dancing, following the music through the streets as the rats had followed it to the river. Their parents ran after them, calling and weeping, but the music was more powerful than any voice.
The piper led the children to the great hill at the edge of town, and a door opened in the side of the hill that no one had ever seen before. The children followed him inside, and the door closed behind them, and the hill was as solid and silent as it had always been.
One child had been left behind — he was lame, and could not keep up with the others, and reached the hill only after the door had shut. He stood before the solid stone, weeping, and when the townspeople found him he told them what he had seen through the door in the moment before it closed: a beautiful country on the other side, green and bright and full of music.
The children were never found. The Mayor lost his position. And Hamelin, for generations afterward, marked its calendar not from the founding of the town, but from the day the piper played.